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Accessibility ready theme

Against my better judgement and some cajoling I have decided to explain why I chose to make an accessibility ready theme rather than just launch it.

Officially I am disabled though you would not know it when you meet me because I was born deaf and have Dyspraxia which when I was a child in the 80’s was still called being clumsy by most people including many Doctors (unfortunately for them my Mother was a nurse at the time) and is the main reason why I hate writing so if you want you can read about Dyspraxia here.

Accessibility ready theme

For about the first 10 years of my life I was almost completely deaf and for about the first 5 years of that my that my mother argued with Doctors that I wasn’t being naughty and really was deaf because I had taught myself to lip read and understand the sounds I could hear. I have always liked crisps and chocolate and even as a child there was no way I was going to miss out on questions like “Would you like some chocolate?” just because I couldn’t hear correctly. 🙂

Nowadays the hearing is ok and probably no better or worse than average if I had to guess. Though I do have terrible problems hearing things like “Please take the rubbish out” 😀

The Dyspraxia I look at now as a skill though at the time it wasn’t much fun falling over most days and looking like I had been beaten. Writing I hate because of it and for me it takes too long write something and I don’t enjoy it so normally I don’t bother and get on with stuff behind the scenes even though it is bad for reputation and SEO to not write or exist a lot in the online social world though I am trying to force myself to do it more

I had to learn solutions to problems because of the lack of coordination and an inability to do basic things like walking, writing, putting cups and plates on the table and open those bars of chocolates and packets of crisp were learnt and trained out of me with a lot of hard work it has meant in my life I naturally make things simple which is why when I worked in manufacturing I could streamline processes even better than they were and I now apply the same rules to building websites.

Now the important stuff

I am releasing this as a free genesis child theme to give back to the Genesis community because I probably wouldn’t be building websites for clients today without the framework and community.

You will also need to install the genesis accessible plugin which make genesis more accessible. Until some of the structural changes that need to happen in the genesis framework happen in the parent theme this is the best way to make any future changes compatible in my opinion.